


Meeting Him

by KupoWonders



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 20:51:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17474780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KupoWonders/pseuds/KupoWonders
Summary: Namine watches Roxas live his false life in Twilight Town, and thinks of the boys she could have once been friends with in another life. Sora, and the boy asleep in a secret room in Castle Oblivion. A boy who looked just like Roxas.





	Meeting Him

**Author's Note:**

> I have a headcanon that Namine at least saw Ventus in Castle Oblivion, and thinks of him whenever she sees Roxas.

DiZ had left the basement of the Twilight Town mansion an hour or so ago, and Namine found herself breathing easier now that he was out of sight. Despite having worked with him for almost a whole year now, she just couldn’t get used to his presence constantly looming behind her, sneering at her progress and growing increasingly frustrated at how long his revenge was taking. She had told him over and over that it was a delicate process, that untangling and rearranging memories – memories that had been thrown to the wind and had twisted and knotted together in ways she hadn’t thought possible, tangled in strands of another person’s very being – was a lot harder than sorting out some jumbled computer wires. You couldn’t pull too harshly, couldn’t pull out one wire to work backwards from one end, not when they were so clearly etched into the essence of another. 

DiZ hadn’t understood, and even if he had, he didn’t care. He scoffed at her attempts at delicacy while removing stolen memories from a Nobody who supposedly didn’t have the heart to care that their existence was being violated. He insisted that it had to be easier now that the true memories that Roxas had spent a year creating, the memories of his real life, the life that shouldn’t have been but still was _his_ , were locked away. He was right, in a way – Roxas’s new memories weren’t snarled in Sora’s, and suppressed memories couldn’t actively cause trouble, no matter how Axel tried to reawaken them. But by now she was nearly done, and she wasn’t going to start becoming needlessly cruel in the final stretch. 

Riku was still lingering nearby, silently hovering beside the door that led to the pod rooms. He had never been very quiet in Sora’s memories, always brash and just as recklessly brave as his best friend, but since he had returned from The World That Never Was with both Roxas and a different face he seemed reluctant to speak. She couldn’t blame him – if she had suddenly had Marluxia’s face, or his voice, she didn’t think she’d be able to look at anyone ever again, let alone talk to them. And Ansem had hurt and haunted him more than Marluxia haunted her. But he was still trying to help, even though he was hurting – he told her if she was pulling too hard on the chain of memories, if she was getting the individual links confused or if his own memories of Sora were becoming hazy. And he was another person in this cold, dark basement who cared about Sora and not about revenge – who recognised that what they were doing was horrific, but was still the best solution to this wretched problem. 

He was also the only person who had really spoken to Roxas at all before they had tossed him into DiZ’s machine.

The blond boy was on one of the screens in front of her, laughing with locals of Twilight Town that he didn’t really know, creating memories unaffected by Sora that she could easily ignore in her work. Something in her chest ached when she looked at him, oblivious to where he was and what was happening, and happier than he would have been if he had known. She wanted to sit him down and explain why his world was splintering apart around him, explain that this wasn’t his fault, wasn’t anyone’s fault but hers for being weak and allowing her loneliness to let her listen to Marluxia and his cruel plans. She wanted to apologise to him, even though she knew she couldn’t make it right. 

She wanted to ask him if he remembered her.

Deep down, in her heart (she scolded herself at the thought – of course she didn’t have a heart, she was just a body with powers she didn’t understand, any aches in her chest or tears in her eyes were just phantoms, stolen from Kairi like the shadow she was) she knew that he wouldn’t remember her. Part of her knew that he wasn’t even the boy she had spoken to in Castle Oblivion, even if they looked so similar that when she had first seen the golden haired boy in the Organization’s heavy, suffocating uniform (the uniform of the people who had kept her trapped, had knocked her to the ground, had hurt her and used her to hurt others) she had wanted to scream. She couldn’t bear the thought of the boy who had kept her company in the first days of her existence being used by the people who had turned them into a hell. 

She had come to life drowning in a sea of memories that weren’t hers, of stars shining in a sky she had never seen, of star-shaped fruit and star-shaped glass charms shimmering in hands that were not hers. She had woken beside a chair that was white, in a room that was white, but that she felt should have instead been golden and brown, lit by a kaleidoscope of colour pouring in through stained glass windows – although she had no idea why she thought that. 

There had been a boy sitting in the chair, breathing softly and silently with his eyes closed. A boy who she remembered being in memories that weren’t hers. A boy who looked just like Roxas. 

She had talked to him, about the memories that hung around her but were not hers, about the boy who loved his friends so much that he had sacrificed himself to save them (both of them), trying to sort the memories into categories that she could understand. Into the life of the boy in the chair, and the boy from the islands. 

But the more she spoke about the friendships that played out in her mind the more her own loneliness began to grow. She wished that he would wake up and talk to her, and become her friend. She wished that Sora would come through the door of this lonely room, whole and smiling, and would open his heart to her like he had opened it to others. (Like he had opened it to Kairi, without even knowing.)

The boy in the chair had never spoken a word to her, or opened his eyes, no matter what she did. And after days of sitting beside him, drowning in the memories and the thought of friendships that she could one day have, she had needed to escape to find them. She needed to get out of this room, out of this castle, so that she could meet people who could be her real friends… and had walked straight into Marluxia’s arms, and his poison promises that she could be free if she only did what he asked.

Her fingers tightened on the sketchpad balanced on her lap, full of drawings of the past lives of the boys who had never known her, and she watched the boy who saw their lives play out in his dreams. Sora’s monitor stood beside Roxas's, gently beeping with his heartbeat and his progress, bathing her in soft blue light. She heard Riku shift behind her and almost jumped, having forgotten that he was there. 

“I’m… I’m going to go see Sora,” he said quietly, moving away from the wall. When his tone was gentle he sounded more like his old self than the Seeker of Darkness, and now she barely heard the gravel of Ansem’s voice. He always was gentle with her, even if she didn’t deserve it. 

She glanced over her shoulder at him, and although she couldn’t see his face, hidden as it was under the hood of that awful coat (although hadn’t he also tried to hide himself behind a blindfold, before all this?) she sent him what she hoped was a comforting smile. 

“I’ll watch things from here,” she assured him, and with a small nod he stepped away, into the long corridor that led to the pods where Sora, Donald and Goofy were sleeping. The door closed behind him with a quiet whoosh, and Namine was left alone with the screens showing the boys that she knew better than she knew herself. 

She flipped open her sketchpad, pulling a pencil out of the spiral binding holding it together, and poised it above the page. She watched Roxas leave the Usual Spot, hoping for a beach trip that DiZ would never allow him to have, and wondered what strange plans the AIs in the data world would concoct to distract him from the trip he could never take. 

As she watched, a tiny, mad seed of an idea began to form in her mind. DiZ would be so angry, and if Riku came back too soon he would worry, but once it was there she couldn’t quite bring herself to dismiss the thought. What harm would it do, to say hello to Roxas? What was so wrong with finally talking to the boy whose life she had watched and interfered with from the moment she had known his name? What was so bad about allowing herself to pretend that they could be friends, like she had pretended with the boy sleeping in Castle Oblivion, or the boy sleeping a few rooms away? She could be honest with Roxas, like she couldn’t have been honest with Sora in the beginning. 

She was the only person who could be honest with Roxas.

_I want to meet you, at least once._

She flipped her sketchpad closed, and began to type code into the computer that controlled the data world. Something that couldn’t be a heart was beginning to sing with excitement in her chest, and as she hopped away from the monitors and the dark room and toward the digital transporter, she found that she was smiling. 

She’d only be gone for a moment. Just long enough for him to see her, to really see her, and for her to enter his memories. Even if she wasn’t a happy memory, she could still become a memory that belonged there, rather than one that needed removing or one that never existed. They were both never supposed to exist, DiZ had said so, so surely it was fitting that they could be the ones who remembered one another as someone other than the shadow of Sora, or of Kairi? 

She had to stop herself from bouncing on the spot as the light of the transporter enveloped her, allowing her to shift into data and traverse the other Twilight Town. She thought of the boy sleeping in Castle Oblivion, and how she’d always pictured him opening his eyes and looking at her as she told him what she remembered. 

She was going to talk to Roxas about everything.


End file.
